Heaven Can Wait

Hell is much more fun. Sam Raimi, welcome back.

Sam Raimi wants to go home again. Often a drifting virtuoso in the
years before finding his Spider-Man gig, with Drag Me to
Hell, Raimi defaults to the horror romps that made his name
(namely, the Evil Dead trilogy), bringing the old barreling
camera and viscous ickiness back and serving a concept lowbrow enough
to discourage A-listers.

Made early last year from a long-shelved script by Raimi and brother
Ivan, Drag Me has a serendipitously timely victim. Playing a
bank loan officer, petite, marshmallow-cheeked Alison Lohman bears the
brunt of the film's supernatural humiliations. Lohman's Christine Brown
is putting the finishing touches on her self-reinvention as a young
professional: eye on a promotion, renting L.A. hillside real estate,
and heading toward marriage with an upmarket boyfriend, Clay (that he's
played by that icon of yuppie brand identity, smug MacBook shill Justin
Long, is slyly perfect). Only leftover photographs and snide comments
from Clay's WASP parents give unwelcome reminders of the tubby farm
girl she used to be.

One day, smothering her conscience to impress her boss, Christine
refuses to take pity on an ancient Gypsy woman about to lose her home
(Lorna Raver, with a malevolent dead eye, horking up neon phlegm). The
Louvin Brothers were right: Satan is real. The hag hisses a hex, and
Christine's life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical
interventions that play like Seventeen magazine's "Embarrassing
Moments," as written by Antonin Artaud. Christine spouts a geyser
nosebleed at work, is ambushed by hallucinations while meeting
potential in-laws, and starts studying animal sacrifice. A visit to a
psychic confirms that she's had a demon sicced on her and that, if it
isn't appeased in time, she'll get the title treatment.

Lohman: Mouth wide open, screaming.

Details

With a PG-13 rating, the movie still smuggles a good amount of
awfulness into adolescent minds. The running joke involves getting
Christine into situations where her mouth — usually wide open,
screaming — is invaded by incredibly vile things: a spelunking
fly, a gush of grubs, embalming fluid. Otherwise, the harassing spirit
comes on Moe Howard-style, snapping her head back and forth or
unloading a full-body, across-the-room heave. If the booga-booga shocks
are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its
last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob
Murawski through a burlesque exorcism (with a possessed goat, seemingly
related to the cackling trophy in Evil Dead 2), Christine's dash
to find a substitute for her place in hell, and the final slamming door
of the title card.

The combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick made
Michigan State dropout Raimi a Fangoria star with 1981's
resourceful Evil Dead, on the vanguard of an international
groundswell of indie horrors. Kiwi-era Peter Jackson, Return of the
Living Dead, Re-Animator, Frank Henenlotter, Nekromantik
— these grassroots sickies, marked by tumor-black humor and
try-anything camera work, were an inventive, sanguinary alternative to
the flat-out-awful middle range of '80s movies (and, in some cases,
résumés for a next generation of blockbuster
technicians).

Was this throwback Raimi's way of collecting himself after
disappearing into Spider-Man 3's narrative overgrowth? The sense
of control is palpable; Raimi, ever the engineer, takes pleasure in
screwing with audience identification, shifting between collaboration
and contempt for our heroine. We take Christine's side against a
brown-nose coworker (Reggie Lee, very good), Clay's pinky-in-air
parents, and that Gypsy witch-bitch, whose grotesqueness forestalls
sympathy — but it's squeaky-cute Christine who is all along the
secret villain. On the surface an Evil Dead successor, Drag
Me, an allegory with karmic logic from E.C. Comics and Jack Chick,
replays as farce Raimi's A Simple Plan, also based on the
boomerang return of transgression.

Christine getting bonged on the head with a cross for forgetting the
Golden Rule doesn't indicate a particularly nuanced moral vision. Does
Raimi — who began his career on a shoestring in the Tennessee
woods and now commands $300 million bonanzas — actually
believe professional ambition should be punished with eternal
damnation?